As if it were the same script already written in the most important assassinations in history. As soon as the riot started yesterday at the Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil, the most dangerous in Ecuador, the Ecuadorian prison authorities discovered why it had started, when they found the bodies of the six Colombian hitmen who participated in the assassination of the presidential candidate in August. Fernando Villavicencio.
Jhon Gregore Rodríguez, Andrés Manuel Mosquera, Adey Fernando García, Camilo Andrés Romero, Jules Osmín Castaño and José Neyder López Hitas were part of the murderous commando, headed by the perpetrator of the shooting, Johan David Castillo, 18 years old, who died in the fray after the fact. Most of them were recruited in neighborhoods of the Colombian city of Cali, although they also came from Bogotá and Florencia, in coffee-growing Caquetá.
The Colombian newspaper El Tiempo reported that the six inmates were hanged. From prison it was also assured that they showed no signs of torture or injuries “as a result of any combat.”
The massacre, which occurs only nine days before the second presidential round is to be held and when the Prosecutor’s Office investigation was days away from concluding, has forced President Guillermo Lasso to urgently return to the country from the United States, where he was on leave. journey. “I have arranged to immediately meet with the Security Cabinet. Neither complicity nor cover-up, the truth will be known here,” the president announced from his social networks.
The Prosecutor’s Office proceeded at midnight to remove the bodies, while two leaders and a prison guide were transferred to a flagrante delicto unit to provide their testimony. “There was an order for the security transfer of the PPL (persons deprived of liberty), which was not fulfilled,” the Prosecutor’s Office itself acknowledged. It was the inmates themselves who requested the transfer for safety. According to the newspaper Extra, police agents from special groups and the Armed Forces, in addition to an aeropolice plane, were prepared last Thursday to carry out the transfer, “but the order was not given.”
Pavilion 7, in which the six prisoners were held, is under the control of the Los Águilas gang, responsible together with Los Choneros, the R7, Los Lobos, Los Tiburones or the Chone Killers, under the auspices of the Mexican cartels of Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, of the wave of violence that has overwhelmed Ecuador for months. These gangs have turned prisons into their headquarters, where new soldiers are recruited and drug and extortion operations, called vaccines in the Andean country, are conducted. In the Litoral Penitentiary alone, with more than 12,000 inmates, more than 400 murders have occurred.
The six Colombian hitmen had arrived at this prison on September 12, after a drone with explosives landed on the roof of the La Roca prison, where they were admitted after their arrest.
“They must answer for their complicit negligence,” accused the Construye movement, which championed Villavicencio in the first electoral round, President Lasso and the Penitentiary Service.
“If they are Villavicencio’s hitmen, it confirms that the government was behind the crime,” directly accused former president Rafael Correa, who for years viciously persecuted Villavicencio, then an investigative journalist.
